Sony Xperia T review

They're calling it the James Bond phone, but rather like the excruciatingly obvious product placement of the James Bond Rolex in

Casino Royale, Bond seems to get what he pays for.

In this case, 007's £400 gets him a dual-core processor, a 4.6-inch screen and a 13-megapixel camera -- handy for recording SMERSH secrets or recording those Q tech briefings he can never be bothered to pay attention to.

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The camera, updated OS and slightly bigger screen put it a smidgeon above Sony's last hero handset, the Xperia S, in tech terms, but in truth, not by much.

Design

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Looks-wise, it's fairly discreet, with gently curving rubberised plastic casing (sealed, not accessible) and slivery silver buttons on the side for volume, camera and power. On the side is the micro USB power slot, which handily doubles as mini HDMI output thanks to MHL technology. Both micro SIM and microSD cards are hidden behind a flap on the side that clicks easily but securely into place.

The 4.6-inch display offers an impressively sharp resolution of 1280x720 pixels with 16m colours. There may be a lot of them, but the colours aren't quite as vibrant as some of the Super Amoled screens we've been seeing from Samsung and others, but they look arguably more realistic. Unusually, the Android back, home and multitasking menu buttons have been incorporated into the display rather than sitting below it, which allows the screen to stretch out a bit.

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Features

It's good to see Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on-board straight from the box, though it would have been even better to see the very latest 4.1 Jelly Bean. Still, it's a slick and smooth OS, even with Sony's aesthetic skim that jiggles around with some of the usual functions. For instance, you can add shortcuts to the various home screens by touching on an app in the apps list, but to install a widget, you'll need to press on a home screen to summon a list, which seems a bit counterintuitive.

The dual-core 1.5GHz processor is backed by 1GB RAM and packs a pretty hefty punch. AnTuTu benchmarking delivered a performance score of 7,061 -- that's powerful for a dual-core handset, well ahead of the Huawei Ascend P1 and the earlier Xperia P, though it's lagging behind quad-core monsters like the Samsung Galaxy S3.

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Like other recent Xperias, it comes with NFC, so you're ready to go with mobile payment systems and Sony's SmartTags, which let you switch on a range of settings just by touching the phone to them.

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The SmallApps system is handy too. Available from the multitasking menu, it overlays various apps over the page you're looking at, such as a calculator, a stopwatch and notes.

Camera and storage

Sony has proved time and again that it can make a decent camera, and this is a good example. With 13 megapixels it's one up on the Xperia S but offers a similar level of quality -- ie pretty high.

It has Sony's Exmor R for mobile CMOS sensor, designed to enhance your pictures in low light, plus a 16x digital zoom and pictures were generally sharp and detailed. There's no drop in video quality either, and it will record full 1080p HD video. There's also a 1.3 megapixel camera on the front for video calls, which can record at 720p HD.

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There's 16GB of memory on board, but you can only use 2GB of it for apps and games, which is unfortunate. You really should be able to assign available memory however you see fit. Fortunately you can add up to 32GB more via microSD card -- something you can't do with the Xperia S.

The 1,850mAh battery put up a decent fight, and dragged about a day's worth of heavy use out of the juice-hungry processor.

Conclusion

The Sony Xperia T nudges just ahead of its sister handset the Xperia S with its updated OS, slightly bigger screen and a camera that's just a teensy bit more advanced. Bond may have offed 006 in

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GoldenEye, but the T doesn't look like it's quite ready to kill off the S. If you've already got the S, it's probably not worth upgrading, but if you're after a top-notch Android, this one's worth considering.